To preserve if not enhance intelligence, work on speed of information processing

—

Declin­ing intel­li­gence in old age linked to visu­al pro­cess­ing (Sci­ence Daily):

“Researchers have uncov­ered one of the basic process­es that may help to explain why some peo­ple’s think­ing skills decline in old age…

“The results sug­gest that the brain’s abil­i­ty to make cor­rect deci­sions based on brief visu­al impres­sions lim­its the effi­cien­cy of more com­plex men­tal func­tions,” says Stu­art Ritchie of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Edin­burgh. “As this basic abil­i­ty declines with age, so too does intel­li­gence. The typ­i­cal per­son who has bet­ter-pre­served com­plex think­ing skills in old­er age tends to be some­one who can accu­mu­late infor­ma­tion quick­ly from a fleet­ing glance.”

The results pro­vide evi­dence that the slow­ing of sim­ple, visu­al deci­sion-mak­ing process­es might be part of what under­lies declines in the com­plex deci­sion mak­ing that we rec­og­nize as gen­er­al intel­li­gence. The results might also find prac­ti­cal use giv­en the sim­plic­i­ty of the inspec­tion time measure…”

Study: A strong link between speed of visu­al dis­crim­i­na­tion and cog­ni­tive age­ing. (Cur­rent Biology)

• Abstract: Attempts to explain people’s dif­fer­ences in intel­li­gence and cog­ni­tive age­ing often hypoth­e­size that they are found­ed sub­stan­tial­ly upon dif­fer­ences in speed of infor­ma­tion pro­cess­ing …We mea­sured visu­al ‘inspec­tion time’, a psy­chophys­i­cal indi­ca­tor of the effi­cien­cy of the ear­ly stages of per­cep­tu­al pro­cess­ing , in a large (n = 628 with full data), nar­row-age sam­ple at mean ages 70, 73, and 76 years…Results showed a mod­er­ate cor­re­la­tion between inspec­tion time per­for­mance and intel­li­gence, and a strong cor­re­la­tion between change in inspec­tion time and change in intel­li­gence from 70 to 76. These results sup­port the pro­cess­ing speed the­o­ry of cog­ni­tive age­ing. They go beyond cross-sec­tion­al cor­re­la­tion to show that cog­ni­tive change is accom­pa­nied by changes in basic visu­al infor­ma­tion pro­cess­ing as we age.

Learn more:

• Does brain train­ing work? Yes, if …